More villains than heroes so far aboard sinking Costa Concordia

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Updated: February 19, 2012 8:14AM

If you’ve been on a cruise, you know the drill. Literally.

Shortly after boarding the ship, there’s an announcement, you grab life vests, you head to your designated deck, you find your spot and there’s a safety drill and roll call.

The only cruises I’ve been on have set sail from Florida, but I always assumed the rules were international. You board a vessel that’s gonna take you so far out on the water that you won’t be able to see land in any direction, it stands to reason they’re gonna start off by telling you about putting on the life vest, working the whistle and the flashlight, boarding the lifeboats, etc.

And indeed there are rules — but those rules need revising.

Why wait a full day?

Paul Motter of the Cruisemates.com travel site, on the Fox News website: “Under the U.S. Coast Guard rules and the International Maritime Organization . . . cruise ships must conduct a safety drill within 24 hours of sailing. . . . It must include instructions on the use of life jackets and how and where to gather in an emergency.”

Officials for the Costa Concordia said safety drills were scheduled for the day after the ship ran aground, still within the one-day period after most of the passengers had boarded the ship in Rome. But a couple that had boarded the ship three days earlier in Barcelona told the Orlando Sentinel they had yet to go through a safety drill.

Whenever there’s a tragedy involving some activity in which millions participate, inevitably some of us in the media will talk about the rules and regulations and how they should be changed. Start the marathon earlier in the morning or later in the year! Install barricades so fans can’t fall onto the field even if they tried! Make sure the pilots have adequate sleep between flights!

Change the rules so cruise ships have to conduct evacuation drills within hours, not a day, of leaving port.

But that one makes sense, doesn’t it? Waiting 24 hours (or longer) to conduct a safety drill is tantamount to a flight instructor taking out the seat belt prop and the oxygen mask when you’re halfway through your flight.

Costa Concordia survivor Vanessa Rosales told us on WLS-AM that not only were there no safety drills, she wasn’t allowed to return to her room to retrieve her life jacket; there were conflicting messages from crew members about what passengers should do; and people were knocking each other over to get to the lifeboats as the ship tilted. Rosales said, “It was just like a scene from the Titanic.”

Rosales and her mother were watching a magic show when trouble first struck.

“When we heard a big thud . . . an announcement came on saying everything was OK, it was just a minor technical difficulty.
. . . The [ship] tilted a little, enough that all our glasses fell to the floor and broke.
. . . The scary thing is that right when that happened, the magician just jumped off the stage and ran off. . . . They told us everything was OK, but the magician was running off the stage and not returning.”

Too soon for a disappearing joke?

Forget about the magician taking off. Even the myth of the captain going down with the ship is just that — folklore. In this case, we’re told Capt. Francesco Schettino refused to return to the ship to oversee the evacuation.

“Tell me if there are children, women and what type of help they need,” a Coast Guard official says to the captain, according to an Italian newspaper that says it has a recording of the tape.

“Listen Schettino, perhaps you have saved yourself from the sea but I will make you look very bad . . .” says the Coast Guard official. “Dammit, go back on board!”

Meanwhile, a 62-year-old woman told the London Daily Mail, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking into [my granddaughters]. It was awful.”

Who knows what any of us would do in such circumstances. But if someone writes a book or makes a movie about this tragedy, it sounds as if it’ll be easier to paint the villains than find the heroes.